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This is the sort of thing I would ask @nyrath about. I don't know if a mention like that can summon him.
I love to think of fanciful physics for astronautics, and I think audiences like it best when the system is self-consistent. It's very hard to design systems that don't lead to contradictions or paradoxes. In a way I think it's like designing a playable game.
@swope @DmMacniel
Alas, I am not on Lemmy, so I never saw the original post.
In this case, I again note that the important thing is to focus on Effects, not Causes.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php#id--Establishing_Limits
The desired Effect is "intercept / interdict the heroes".
The proposed Cause of "deploy gravimetric wells" seems to have too many unintended consequences. For starters it can destroy planets.
Perhaps some technobabble that slows down the protagonist's ship engine?
I am honored! I'll take a look on your document.
And yeah gravimetric wells are a bit overkill.
Another user suggested, as the travel sequence is on rails, that sending projectiles or other kind of weaponry toward them from the other side would be a suitable idea.
I started following @nyrath on Google+, and followed him as a refugee to Twitter. I lost track of him when I abandoned Twitter (mostly) after the Muskageddon. I escaped Reddit recently and happened to find him again.
Now I have this idea for space settlers jumping from one corporate colony to another as their once-visionary founders turn to squeezing profit from their tenants.
@swope @nyrath @DmMacniel Collapsing corporate space colonies seems really underexplored, but very cyberpunk, theme
@simonbp @swope @nyrath @DmMacniel
Story concepts:
Giganaire buys space colony and cuts costs, killing himself and everyone on the colony because he used air filters made from toilet paper.
Giganaire buys space colony and fires 3/4 of the maintenance staff, claiming they weren't doing a good enough job, but does not replace them.
Hey, this is fun!
@darrelplant @simonbp @swope @DmMacniel
The stories almost write themselves, don't they?
There is actually a real world analog to that...
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/colonysite.php#shanty1
What was the purpose of parking near each other? It doesn't seem like the crews could cross over to the other ships.
I like the idea of the Agents knowing to some degree when and where the Heroes are going to arrive. Played right it could add a lot of tension. If jump-drive has a predetermined destination I imagine that once it kicks in your ship is locked into its path--only being able to be knocked from it or, as you suggest , something is done to slow the Heroe's ship.
How it could work dramatically: the Heroes slip away from the Agents using the jump-drive. The Agents quickly activate some device (a pulsing buoy, technobabble) in the last place the ship was seen. It lets off three thumps in every direction. The Agent's ships rock back with each pulse after which they retrieve the buoy. A little dialogue about waiting for the pulses to dissipate before engaging their own jump-drive ("we don't want to get caught in the pulse's wake") and they're off.
Cut to the Heroes ship in the jump-space: They think they've made a quick escape but the ship stumbles and an alarm goes off. A quick look at their instruments tells them the ship is dropping speed. This happens twice more-the three pulses catching up to them-each time slowing them not quite out of jump-space but enough to know they're heading into the trouble they thought they's just outrun.
This could be used in universe as a something that is rarely deployed because it does affect every ship that engaged jump-drive in that area within a certain timeframe (pick your area of effect and time factors for best storytelling) so it's quite a statement as to how badly the Agents want to thwart the heroes. When the 'pulse buoy' is used, yes, you may slow them down but you may have also affected local commerce, local military and even other Agents in the area by using it. It's effective but costly. You've just broadcast your location and the desperation of your goals to everyone in that area.
That's some great idea and tech you got there! Also great storytelling.
I like science fiction that has limitations even if it's not based on 'realistic' science. Internal consistency and accepting the obvious extrapolations of any invented technology has to be in place for it to not just feel like magic or deus ex machina. I've found that it usually has the bonus of adding to the dramatic possibilities of the story.
Reading this it's easy to think about the #StarWars Interdictor-class Star Destroyer :
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Interdictor-class_Star_Destroyer
In #Traveller #RPG the referee should think about if the buoy can be carried inside a ship or it can be used only by space stations and other technical issues (energy costs, how many times can be used, etc.)
Now that's a great idea, if the buoy can't be transported on a chase ship, space stations only. Making it not always available adds to the drama and keeps it from just being deployed over and over again regardless of its local impact. Even better if only one faction has access to it.
Raising even more concerns and questions when it's used. Very good.
As someone who has to write RPG settings and scenarios, if I can't be consistent with the tech or magic, then I think of what would be the easiest way to do something.
In this case? If I had to do this and didn't want to throw in crazy tech? Easiest way to stop the Heroes? The Villains bribe/blackmail someone to interrupt the jump, or they've planted a device to sabotage the engines at a certain time. They're waiting at that point.
Nothing like a good ambush AND some intrigue ("how did they do that?")
My players hate when I interrupt their journey. We're on month 3 of adventures due to an interrupted journey... and now they trust NOBODY!
In this case? If I had to do this and didn’t want to throw in crazy tech? Easiest way to stop the Heroes? The Villains bribe/blackmail someone to interrupt the jump, or they’ve planted a device to sabotage the engines at a certain time. They’re waiting at that point.
The Villains, that would be damaged by the Information, already hired goons (the agents) to deal with damaging stuff. Subcontracting wouldn't be an option for those professionals. But yeah if the Villain wouldn't have already those agents they sure would hire/blackmail/bribe someone from the empire to make the heroes disappear... permanently.
My players hate when I interrupt their journey. We’re on month 3 of adventures due to an interrupted journey… and now they trust NOBODY!
Don't over do it though, eventually players are so paranoid that they see an enemy even when its just a helpful NPC.
Oh absolutely. We've been in this campaign for 14 years, they know when I'm throwing them a curve ball and when they're among friends. They've just not gotten back to their destination to figure out who is who yet. It's been great fun!
However you want to deal with it, you do you! I just find that when I want to be consistent in my world, less tech/magic and more "people did it" seems to flow better. That's me, though.
Take a page from the way the Putin and the FSB dealt with the Wagner group; hold families hostage. They don't have to interdict the protagonists, they just have to be willing to murder every single person that the protagonist cares about if the protagonist doesn't turn themselves in. The protagonist might be willing to sacrifice their own life to achieve a goal, but are they willing to sacrifice their entire extended family and all of their college friends?
IDK if anticlimactic is the right word. If the antagonists know where the protagonists are going, why would they go out of their way to interdict? Just go where they're going to be and kill them on arrival.
Alternatively, what if the antagonists just have a spy/traitor onboard the heroes' ship?
Just hit 'em with an EMP. Your ship isn't going anywhere while unpowered, even the jump drive will have a "spooling up" period that can be interrupted, and even the most basic, disposable form of thrust - being a solid fuel rocket - can't be fired without a spark. You either have an electronic starter, disabled by the EMP, or else someone crawls up the exhaust tube with a Bic lighter and sacrifices every component atom of their existence to the gods of fiery speed.
The game Starsector has a neat play on this, where certain ships can fire off an "interdiction pulse" which is a short range directed EMP that shuts down the engines of whoever it is pointed at. You can outrun it with a good heading and good tactics, you can juke it with careful positioning, or you can go dark and camp in an asteroid belt and hope the space cops miss you on their search. But if you get got by the interdiction pulse you've got a good 60 seconds or more of being a sitting duck in space. No engines, no comms, you're lucky if the life support even keeps pumping oxygen while the corvettes close in.
If you don't want to deal with the plot holes that massive EMP bursts bring (how do you shield your ship against it's own EMPs? How do you pierce a shielded ship with one?) you could make an "interdiction module" be a legally mandated piece of equipment in every ship, which when activated, cuts power to all major systems. Sort of like how ID transponders are usually handled in space operas - hell, combine the two together. Any ship running dark without a transponder active can be considered a threat to be removed on sight, not only because they aren't broadcasting an identity but also because they may not have an interdiction module installed. Skip the pulling over part of the traffic stop and step right to torpedoes, because they are probably pirates.
Naturally, real pirates won't have an interdiction module and will be attacked on sight by most security forces. A hypothetical protagonist would be able to sabotage their own module to escape capture, at the cost of being assumed to be a pirate until getting it fixed or replaced at, more than likely, a less-than-reputable shipyard.
or else someone crawls up the exhaust tube with a Bic lighter and sacrifices every component atom of their existence to the gods of fiery speed.
Now that sounds like an excellent passage to write
Nice explaination on why the heroes wouldn't be trackable by the agents. They are flying in a pirate ship.
EMPs would be perfect for ruthless agents, they just want to make their boss happy. Cleaning up afterwards could net some valuable resources as well.
You can take an idea from real life(very sad news though when I heard).
The MagLev trains run very fast through a predetermined route. Technically they can go really really fast. But they have to run through a pre-determined route. However, it is through a series of magnets. Earlier iirc, there was a train when some evil people removed just a single magnet and caused the train to crash.
In your novel, the heroes are taking the predetermined route. The main challenge for agents should be to figure out the route. Then pay some mercenaries along a route which cannot be well monitored (due to being remote or conflict zone) to sabotage the route. As the route is predetermined, exact position of the vessel at exact time is known in an unmonitored area. This can be used to create a simpler electromagnetic trap which would reduce the speed over a long distance, or divert the route. EMP can be used to disable the ship, making the ship just a container being transported. The trap later being destroyed, but still leading a trail behind for someone to find what happened. This should work as long as speed is less than light, should work for <0.5c. But the area of influence where control is not possible should be a large geograhic area due to speed.
You can also have that at that particular spot the speed is slow due to a curve etc. And villians are just removing what is causing the route to bend for just an exact moment when heroes are travelling there.
You said there is near-instantaneous communication. How about having the agents "phone ahead" to another group of agents that are nearer to the place the heroes are going and have them jump there first, so that the heroes arrive into an ambush? Police do that sort of thing in high-speed chases in the real world.
Ooh - workshopping a scifi story? My time to shine!
Hope that helps
Source: I do this for a living
My mind immediately went to an as-yet unexplained "inertia sink." My idea is that it somehow (space magic) robs the target of all of its momentum to stop it dead, perhaps channeling it back to the aggressor or into an explosion to knock out the target's engines. Dunno how or if it would work in your universe, though.
0.5c? Is this all taking place in one solar system?
A bag of nails scattered down their trajectory will put a real crimp in their day.
Maybe the fast travel is super sensitive to gravity variances, and if there was a relatively large (i.e. still quite small) change to local gravity along the path of travel the safety systems would kick it out into normal space. It operates on complex gravity surveys that are not updated all that often (i.e. when a star blows up or something else pretty significant).
And, the villians have a fairly large ship / object they can move around to disrupt travel. I'd say they'd have a pretty limited supply of them, and they'd only deploy it for something quite important, and would need pretty decent intelligence on where to plop it.
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Not directly related, but .5c is going to be slooooooooooow for interstellar travel. Proxima Centauri is roughly 268,770 AU away, and 1 AU is about 8.3 light-minutes. That works out to be 2.23M light minutes, or 4.2 light years. If someone is traveling at .5c, that's 8.4 years to get from our solar system to the very closest star system. And of course it's all at relativistic speeds, so while it may not feel long to the people on the ship, it's still the better part of a decade.
Right now, the closest earth-like planet we know of (similar size, similar star, similar orbital period) is Kepler-452b. Kepler-452b is 1800 light years away, or 3200 years for the people observing the craft that was traveling there. This is getting solidly into Joel Haldeman's "The Forever War" territory.
IMO, unless you want to do a lot of math to figure out the effects of time dilation, you might want to have some kind of science-magic that allows your characters to sidestep relativity.
(I believe it was Charles Stross that worked relativity into a galactic cryptocurrency economic system. He got around relativity by assuming that almost all people were inorganic, and able to copy and back up their consciousness, or sleep through the decades that interstellar travel required.)
Maybe something where the well generator pulls your Heroes off course from the pre-defined trajectory and they "drop out" to an unexpected situation, like (and also unlike) when the Millenium Falcon arrives at "Alderaan"?
I guess the method you choose depends on your universe's departures from "real" physics, but also your story's narrative aims. Are you looking to build a tense chase sequence or have a gotcha surprise?